Privacy Policy

Caring Paws Veterinary Care
Hero Veterinary Services Pty Ltd, ABN 96 687 355 700, trading as Caring Paws Veterinary Care
486 Burwood Hwy, Vermont South VIC 3133
Last updated: [date published]

This page explains what information we collect about you when you use our clinic, our website or our phone lines, how we use it, who we share it with, and how to ask us about it. We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988.

What we collect

Your details. Your name, phone number, email address, home address, and how you heard about us.

Your pet’s details. Name, species, breed, age, sex, microchip number, medical history, treatments, test results, images and clinical notes.

Payment details. What you paid, when and how. Card payments are handled by our payment terminal provider under its own security standards, and we do not keep your card number.

Your communication with us. Emails, messages sent through our website contact form, notes from phone calls, and recordings of calls to some of our numbers.

Website and booking data. The pages you view, the device and browser you use, your IP address, the search or advertisement that brought you to us, and cookies, which are explained below.

How we collect it

Most of it comes straight from you when you book, call, visit, email us or fill in a form on our website. Some comes from our online booking service when you register or book through it. With your permission, we ask your previous vet for your pet’s history. Laboratories, specialists and emergency hospitals we work with send us results and discharge notes. Our website and phone tools record how you found us. If a lost pet is brought to us, we may look up the owner’s details in a microchip registry.

Why we use it

We use your information to care for your pet and keep an accurate clinical record, to book and confirm appointments, to send reminders for vaccinations, treatments and follow-ups, to invoice you and take payment, and to answer your questions.

We also use it to meet our legal and professional obligations, including keeping records for the period the law requires and reporting notifiable diseases.

We use it to run and improve the clinic. That includes listening to recorded calls for training, checking that our booking and phone systems are working properly, and understanding which of our advertising brings people to us so that we spend our advertising money sensibly.

If you agree to it on our registration form, we also use your email address and mobile number to stop our advertisements being shown to you. The section on advertising below explains how that works.

Who we share it with

We share only what each provider needs to do its job. We do not sell your information, and we do not give your details to anyone for their own marketing.

ezyVet, the practice software where your pet’s clinical records are kept.
Paws App, the online booking service and pet portal. It creates your client record and syncs your bookings with ezyVet.
WildJar, which provides the phone numbers shown in our advertising and on our website, and records calls to those numbers.
Webflow, which hosts our website and receives what you type into our contact form.
Google, whose analytics and advertising tools measure how people find and use our website.
For Vets, our marketing agency, which works with the website, phone and booking information above on our behalf. A written agreement limits its use of your information to work for our clinic.
Our payment terminal provider, when you pay by card.
Laboratories, imaging services, specialists and emergency hospitals when your pet is referred, transferred or tested.
Your pet insurer, when you ask us to claim on your behalf. If your insurer supports gap-only claims, we send it your invoice and the clinical details it needs so it can pay its share to us directly and you pay only the gap.
Microchip registries and local councils when registration or the law requires it.
Government agencies, regulators or a court when the law requires it.

We share customer details with service providers, including Google, to perform services on our behalf. Each provider has its own privacy policy for the information it holds.

Advertising, and the choice to stop seeing our ads

We advertise on Google. When you click one of our ads, Google places a cookie in your browser so that a booking or call that follows can be counted as coming from that ad. The count reaches us as a number, with no name attached.

If you tick the box on our registration form, we also give Google your email address and mobile number in a scrambled form, called hashing, so that Google can match you to your Google account and stop showing you our ads. Google uses it only to make that match. It never receives anything about your pet, and the list is refreshed from our records rather than shared once and kept.

You can change your mind at any time by emailing us at info@caringpaws.com.au, and we will take you off the list at the next update.

Call recording

Calls to some of our phone numbers, including the numbers shown in our Google ads and on our website, are recorded. We use the recordings to check that bookings were taken correctly, to train our team, and to see which of our advertising brings calls. Our clinic team and our marketing agency can listen to them. Recordings are deleted after three months, and you can ask us to delete a recording of your call sooner.

Cookies and website tools

Our website uses Google Analytics to show us how the site is used, Google Tag Manager and Google Ads conversion tracking to count bookings that come from our ads, and WildJar, which changes the phone number shown on the page depending on how you arrived so we know which ad or search brought you, and sets a cookie to remember that. Our online booking pages are provided by Paws App, which sets its own cookies under its own privacy policy.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. You can also control the ads Google shows you through your Google account’s ad settings.

Reminders and marketing messages

Reminders about your pet’s vaccinations, treatments and appointments are part of caring for your pet, and we send them by SMS or email to the details you give us. We only send promotional messages if you have agreed to receive them, and every one of them includes a way to stop.

Information stored overseas

Some of our providers store or process information outside Australia. Google and Webflow do so in the United States and other countries where they operate, and Paws App may store information in cloud services overseas. WildJar keeps its data in Australia, and our practice software runs on Amazon Web Services servers in Australia. We take reasonable steps to make sure every provider that holds your information handles it carefully.

Keeping your information safe, and for how long

Your records are kept in password-protected systems, and only team members who need them for their work can see them. We keep clinical records for as long as our professional rules and the law require after your pet’s last visit, and then delete or de-identify them. Website analytics data is kept for 14 months.

Seeing and correcting your information

You can ask to see the information we hold about you or your pet, and ask us to correct anything that is wrong. Email info@caringpaws.com.au or ask at reception. We usually respond within 30 days and do not charge for the request, though we may ask for a reasonable cost for copying large records.

Questions and complaints

If you have a question or a concern about how we have handled your information, contact us first and we will do our best to resolve it.

Caring Paws Veterinary Care
486 Burwood Hwy, Vermont South VIC 3133
Phone: 03 9968 7771
Email: info@caringpaws.com.au

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992.